Word: goldman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...YORK—Eugene M. Plotkin ’00, a former Goldman Sachs associate, pleaded guilty Tuesday to an insider trading conspiracy that reportedly earned him and his partner profits of more than $6.7 million...
...What matters is who owns what, who is under pressure and what else they own. Hedge funds are constantly shifting their exposure, so it is difficult to predict the course a crisis will take. But if you are a highly leveraged fund precariously perched as these dominos fall - as Goldman's are today and as LTCM was in 1998 - you become part of the game. And if you are both highly leveraged and big, the problem that started in one insignificant little segment will now become your problem, and a much bigger one. Again, it's all about leverage. This...
...Today we're seeing another improbable linkage. A number of hedge funds are failing; others are seeing returns plunge. Among these is Goldman Sachs's flagship Global Alpha Fund, which burned a quarter of its $10 billion value over the last few weeks. And just as LTCM was free of the Russian debt that precipitated its collapse, Global Alpha was not a player in subprime junk. Indeed, Global Alpha's problems have not come from mortgages at all, but from a portfolio of stocks...
...does this happen? Why is a hedge fund like Global Alpha affected by events in markets far removed from its bread-and-butter exposure? The root of the problem is high leverage. For example, when this debacle hit, one of Goldman's funds was leveraged 6 to 1, so every dollar of investor capital claimed six dollars of positions. This is the dry kindling for a market firestorm. When things go bad for a highly leveraged hedge fund, it gets a margin call and has to sell assets to reduce its exposure. Naturally, as it sells, prices drop. The falling...
...only have several hedge funds suffered or failed as a result of their exposure to U.S. mortgage products, but some banks and insurance companies as far afield as Australia, Germany and Taiwan have also run up large losses. And they are likely just the beginning, with major firms like Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns announcing in recent days that some of their own investments have been badly hit. Second, problems in the U.S. housing-credit-market have also spilled over into the world of "leveraged loans," which have been widely used to finance the global boom in mergers and acquisitions...